Leonardo Lyra Gollo

I am a tenured researcher (“Científico Titular”) of the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) working at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems (IFISC), a joint center of CSIC and the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB). Before joining CSIC as a permanent researcher in 2026, I was a Ramón y Cajal fellow at IFISC (2024–2025), where I developed the project “Brain Network Organization and Dynamics”. Prior to returning to Spain, I held several research positions in Australia, including ARC Future Fellow and Turner Institute Breakthrough Fellow at Monash University (2020–2024), where I led the Brain Networks and Modelling Laboratory. Earlier, I was NHMRC–ARC Dementia Fellow and Senior/Research Officer at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Brisbane (2012–2019), and also held visiting and honorary appointments at the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology.

My research lies at the intersection of physics, neuroscience, and complex systems, with a particular focus on computational and theoretical neuroscience, brain network dynamics, and statistical physics approaches to neural systems. My work aims to understand the multiscale dynamics of brain networks and the computational principles underlying brain function and dysfunction. To investigate these questions, I combine theoretical and computational modeling with approaches inspired by neuroimaging and non-invasive brain stimulation. I am especially interested in how structure, dynamics, and function interact across multiple spatial and temporal scales in the brain. My research has contributed to topics such as criticality in neural systems, hierarchy of timescales, connectomics, synchronization, dendritic computation, and whole-brain modeling in health and disease. More recently, I have focused on developing theoretical frameworks linking heterogeneity, hierarchy, and critical dynamics in the brain, as well as on applications to aging, stroke, dementia, and neurodegenerative disorders. My research is primarily theoretical and computational, but it has been developed in close collaboration with experimentalists and clinicians working in neuroimaging, psychiatry, neurology, and brain stimulation.